The present disclosure relates to upgrading a software appliance at a user system. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to creating an executable upgrade image at a host system based upon a software appliance's version differences, and providing the executable upgrade image to the user system, which executes the executable upgrade image to upgrade the user system's software appliance.
Software appliance products today may be based on complex middleware and many other components that are typically skill intensive, time consuming, and error prone to upgrade. Rich software appliances may also include an ISM software stack (Information Technology Service Management) that, for example, may include software pertaining to a full enterprise database, an application server, multiple applications, an operating system with extensions, and configuration information. When these software appliances require version upgrades, the version upgrades are typically very user-intensive and require multiple installers that are dependent upon other files to complete a software appliance upgrade.